The Last Farewell - Hiroshi Ishii at TEDxTokyo

Hiroshi Ishii, Media Lab researcher known as a pioneer of tangible user interfaces talks about how infrastructures on the Internet connected people, information and resources and helped sufferers of huge natural disasters. And then, he shows beautiful examples of traces of physical presence and extended affordances of daily objects.

Hey, good morning.

It’s really great pleasure
for me to come back

because I’ve been here
almost 20 years ago.

TED 4 KOBE.

How many of you guys
were in Kobe?

Plentiful. Great!

It’s a great place
to share ideas,

learn so many stuff,
but also connecting people.

In this event 1993,
I met Nicholas Negroponte.

I often call him Nikochan Daio.

The next year,
he headhunted me in Atlanta,

then I moved to MIT.

Today, I’d like to share
some reflection about 3.11.

Kondo-san gave great perspectives

from social media point of views.

Also I thought a lot
what really happened.

What could be learned?

What could be shared
to the next generations?

March 11th, 14:46,

the series of earthquakes hit,

then some sequence of Tsunamis,

then resulting a nuclear crisis,
as many of you know.

How to respond to these crises
is really important question.

And as all you saw,
so many new hash tags,

so many people’s good will,

good mind tried to help each other.

But this, all the timeline is
so rapid a stream.

Nobody can really manage
or catch up.

So how to make these information
manageable?

How to organize information?

How to decrease entropy?
Usable?

It’s really a challenge from
information technology point of view.

So, for me, connecting people and people,
beloved ones who are missed,

connecting people information,

"I know somebody brings water.

Where can I get the water?

Where should I be there?"

"I need medicines.

I’m here.

Who can deliver it?"

"I have a truck
but I don’t have gasoline."

"I have gasoline
but I don’t have permission."

"I don’t know which road I can go."

All these information have
to be connected together.

So that connecting people, information and resources
seems to be one of important challenges.

I’d like to shed a light
for crisis mapping.

Mapping is important.

If information is geotagged,

you can really anchor all information
to the geographical information system.

That dramatically decreases the entropy.

Crisis mapping and also crowdsourcing
and, in large, collective intelligence

that's ground vision of my hero Doug Engelbart
came out many many years ago.

So I’d like to show quickly
some of the examples.

The great news is I’m here.

Bad news is I have
only ten minutes.

So, Ushahidi is one of the great infrastructures
of open source crisis mapping.

It not only demonstrated the power
in the Sumatra Tsunami,

but the Haiti earthquake.

Then people worked together hard.

So, on the next day,
all the sinsai.info,

using the same infrastructure
Ushahidi,

started collecting all the information
automatically or manually.

This is a great accomplishment.

Speed is the key.

Also Google did a remarkable job.

They have a crisis response team

and for me,
most impressive part is,

people need information about
where my loved one is.

But all the network,
telephone is dead.

So, the last thing they did is
using hand-written list of the roster,

of the people
who safely evacuated into shelters.

But there’s no way
to really share this information.

Everybody have to visit all the shelters to see
if my loved one, family is there.

So, Google encourage people
grab your cellular phones,

charge up your batteries,

then go to these shelters from the area
who have not really suffered.

They shoot photos, upload to Picasa,
then share it.

Then next, crowdsourcing.

You guys, stop watching TV.

Please donate your time,
cognitive surplus.

Why don’t you help us to transcribe Japanese language
if you know Japanese language?

Then turn into the text.

Code EUC, EBCDIC or Shift-JIS, whatever

which machine can search for you.

So now, all information
went to this Person Finder.

This stream of the information
many people worked together

is so important.

Radiations.

Now, many people are
having Geiger counters,

then measuring,
then uploading and sharing.

This is a data
from Fukushima Prefecture.

Pachube is another great open source
platform of all the sensor data.

But I think this is the first time

they used to aggregate all the data
from Geiger counters about the radiation.

Now, you can see in Fukushima area
near nuclear power plant is deadly blood.

But Tokyo is OK.

But many people
do not see this difference,

don’t understand
how wind or water may work.

So, they just panicked.

Then asked all the people
to evacuate from Japan.

So, we lost many people.

So, scientific communication,
crowdsourcing, sharing are so important.

This is another variation of 3D view
mapped with Google Earth.

Infrastructures like maps
are so important.

Also crowdsourcing, connecting,
making information manageable.

So, connecting people
and information, resources.

So many lessons we can learn.

This is only a tiny portion.

I learned so much
in the past 3 months.

I collected so much data to Evernote.

How many of you are using Evernote?
It’s great.

But I have to ask Evernote guy,
"Oh, I used up 1 GB.

Can you give me more?
Because it's so important."

So, don’t miss this opportunity of lessons.

So many things you can learn,
digest later.

But important thing is got to be open
in the meaning of radical openness claims.

If it's not open it's dead,

all your supply chain in your company
is corporate secret.

But in a crisis of supply chain,

because if all the companies try to keep
key materials, everything stuck.

Unless you make open,
you cannot restructure, repair,

the new kind of global supply chain,
for example.

Crowdsourcing.

Human is the most powerful entities.

It’s not necessarily computationally readable,
machine readable.

Human readable.
Photo is great.

Photo is great.

Photo sharing is great.

But then, we need to translate
for the machine.

Dumb machine can still search.

Crowdsourcing, mashup
and curation are so important.

So many volunteers started
to connect similar information.

But then, you have to really aggregate.

Also beautifully lay out.

How many of you are using
Flipboard on the iPad?

So, you know what I mean.

So many sources of information
but you need consistent experiences,

seamless experiences
to digest all this information.

Also filtering, prioritization.

So, curation is the key.

Then, market of supply and demand.

Somebody displays needs of medicines.

Somebody has a truck.
Somebody has gasoline.

How to connect those people
is so important.

Amazon used Wish List for the gift
to help those kinds of entity.

They have infrastructure.

But also they need volunteers
like us or you guys.

So many Twitter volunteers
appeared in the Twittersphere.

So, there is a certain sign of hope
towards the reconstruction.

So, the keyword came from the bamboo talk
of Garr Reynolds is "resilient."

How to make the world resilient
to another series of crises?

They don’t stop.

They keep coming.

Energy, financial, natural disaster,
environmental crises.

So, it’s nice to make the world
fun, happy, wealthy,

but most importantly,
how to make the world resilient,

how to quickly make world recover from
the next series of disasters seem important goals.

In that context, the role of connecting
chains is much more bigger.

That’s great.

But time is running out.
Oh my gosh!

(Laughter)

One of my most favorite poets,
Kenji Miyazawa,

came from Tohoku area,
Iwate Prefecture

where I travel a lot
using night trains.

And I read his poems
so many times.

I follow lot of the people, but most favorite people
are deceased poets, the bots.

Because their tweets are so condensed
and so stimulating like Kenji Miyazawa's

(Japanese): fetch me the rainlike snow.

(Japanese): Thank you,
my brave little sister.

Every word strikes me,
makes me think.

Why I received this message?

There must be some meaning.

So there’s no random stuff.

Everything has reason,
necessity.

So I have to decode the meaning.

That is my training
of the creativity.

But problem is, this is
all 12 pt. font beautiful stuff.

But real poems I saw in Hanamaki,
his museum, are amazing.

Hand-written manuscripts

which capture all the traces
of his body, spirit, struggles.

Write and rewrite and rewrite.

Yellow papers and spread ink.

He couldn’t really come up
the way to express his grief

of losing beloved, his
young sister Toshiko.

But then, his poem went to
not a personal grief,

but the level of religious level.

It’s amazing.

But seeing these processes,
is such a pleasure for me.

But before seeing this one,

I only knew
the beautifully printed book.

Book is great, font is great
for mass production

and standardization,
also Internet,

but something missing is this:

traces of physical presence
or struggle of the spirit.

Sometimes it’s so important for the art.

So, I want to see artists
stand up and complain.

Why do you remove
all the most important stuff?

Why you only put
the clean final stuff?

Also the consumers like me
should really stand up.

So, these traces stimulate imagination,
then art is completed.

With your imagination,
art piece complemented.

So, Haiku, Tanka is much more powerful
than the perfect HDTV movie.

That’s my point.

So, I want to show one piece I did
for my most loved woman,

my mom.

(Classical music)

So, this is a piece
called musicBottles.

I want to show how it can
extend the affordance

of the simple bottle opening and closing
to the digital domain.

Now, you can put anything
you imagine, speech or poems.

So, it’s nice music.

Also oriental glass blowing studio
to make the perfect glass.

But the beauty is one of a kind.

Once it drops, it’s broken.

You can’t reboot.
It’s not a game.

It’s a real stuff.

This brings esthetic pleasure,
emotional pleasure.

That’s so critical.

But the reason I did this project
is not for the music.

This is for my mom.

I had a dream to gift to my mom which has
a weather forecast of Sapporo City, our hometown.

So, when she wakes up,
she opens up the bottles.

(Chirps of birds)
So, today’s a fine day.

She cooked for me and my young sister
thousands times opening soy sauce bottles.

Opening soy sauce bottles,
a fragrance comes.

That is what she understand,
beautiful art.

Why we have to ask old people
to learn cellular phone or computers,

forcing them to learn Emacs-ESC-sequence-like
stupid artificial language?

Which is nothing to do with her.

She never uses any machines,
cellular phones,

but she has a beautiful world
and she took care of me.

She passed away 1998.

But so many things
about what I learned from her.

So, future is very important.

So, I’m so happy
to be with you guys.

But in 2050, I’m gone
somewhere else.

My students say,
my coordinate might be wrong.

But wonderful news is, altogether 2100
nobody can survive.

(Laughter)
(Applause)

But the future continues.

Future never stops.

It’s not the next quarter,
not retirement, not your death.

But to the people in 2200,

if you are creators or visionaries,

how do you want
to be remembered by people?

Your idea, not name.

What do you leave for them?

That’s a question
I’ve been asking to myself,

my students and my collegues.

Memento Mori.

After the lights,

infinite eternal future
is waiting for us.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)